Oliver set his own bills on the bar and leaned toward my ear. “We’re out of here,” he said, starting to get up. Just then, the idiotic man closest to me tossed his drink at one of the others, and I jumped from my stool, trying to get my ankle and its monitor out of harm’s way. I moved too quickly. The stool toppled over behind me, catching my right ankle—the one without the monitor—in one of the rungs, twisting it hard enough to make me scream as I fell to the floor. The men never stopped fighting. They were so damn drunk. God, I hate drunks, I thought. Wyatt and Oliver were instantly next to me on the floor, helping me up, while Adam extracted my foot from the rungs of the stool. All three of them were talking to me, but I couldn’t hear a word they said for the cacophony.

Once I was on my feet, Oliver took my hand and cleared a path for us through the sea of revelers, leaving Adam and Wyatt behind. I kept up with him, hoping against hope that my monitor was clean and dry.

Outside, I felt a welcome blanket of thick midsummer-night air wrap around me, the craziness inside the bar nothing more than a hum now.

“What a zoo!” Oliver said, and I could see him shake his head in the light from the streetlight. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” I bent over and lifted the leg of my jeans to see if my monitor was unscathed, but it was too dark to tell. Bending like that, though, I suddenly became aware of pain in my right ankle, the one that had been caught in the rungs of the barstool. It was just enough of a twinge to make me yelp.

“What’s wrong?” Oliver asked.

“Caught my ankle in the bar stool when I fell,” I said. “It’s okay, I think.”

“Can you walk? We can head back to the gallery and I’ll give you a ride to Lisa’s.”

I nodded and we started walking. We talked about how the inpainting was going on the mural and the challenge Oliver was having as he wrote the text for it, since Anna Dale’s reasons for adding her oddities to the painting were unknown. I could barely concentrate on the conversation, though. Every time I put my weight on my right foot, I winced, and by the time we reached the corner, I could go no farther.

“Sorry,” I said, coming to a stop. I leaned against a lamppost, balancing on my left foot and right toe. “I don’t think I can make it to the gallery.”